"...the sick Nazi comparison works both ways: It elevates political opponents into homicidal criminals who deserve extreme punishment, while reducing real historical monsters into little more than petty partisan zealots."

Victor Davis Hanson writes about critics of Donald Trump. One was

Laura Bush, who recently compared the temporary detention of children — after their parents had been apprehended for breaking U.S. immigration law — to the forced internment of tens of thousands of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent. Mrs. Bush has apparently forgotten that the warped comparison to the Japanese interment was used as a slur against her husband during the Abu Ghraib mess and also after the announcement of the administration’s forced renditions of terrorist suspects to foreign countries. In her hierarchy of crimes, is temporarily housing children separately from their law-breaking parents a greater crime than enhanced interrogations, the “collateral damage” that accrues from drone strikes, or the use of the interrogation methods in foreign countries on suspects sent there by the U.S. government?

VDH never forgets!

Harry Truman claimed that his Republican opponent in the 1948 election, Thomas Dewey, was a “front man” for fascists. In 1964, California governor Pat Brown suggested that the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater had “the stench of fascism.” Brown added, “All we need to hear was ‘Heil Hitler.’” After 1980, leftists used the Nazi slur frequently against Ronald Reagan.

“Nazi!” was also a familiar favorite of the Left during the George W. Bush administration, widely employed across the progressive spectrum. Folk singer Linda Ronstadt, dramatist Harold Pinter, cartoonist Ted Rall, and financier George Soros all tied George W. Bush either to Nazism in general or to Adolf Hitler in particular.

Mainstream Democratic politicians — including former vice president Al Gore and the late senators Robert Byrd (D., W.Va.) and John Glenn (D., Ohio) — took delight in slurring George W. Bush or his supporters as Nazis or brown shirts.

The target of the Nazi smear, to avoid even the appearance of affinity with an odious monster and his regime, supposedly will offer psychological penance or policy concessions in hopes that his critics will curb their hysteria. If George W. Bush is Hitler, or Stephen Miller is Joseph Goebbels, or a German-accented Trump is sending Mexican nationals to Auschwitz-like death camps, then what is the patriotic thing for an American to do about them? One answer might be to take out Trump-Hitler, or take up arms to stop his Nazi takeover of the U.S., or force the target of such slurs to submit to reeducation to cleanse and reset his mind in a properly correct fashion.

Perhaps such logic is one reason we simultaneously see both the rise of Nazi slurs and the hyperbolic talk of killing a conservative president. Assassination chic also did not begin with Donald Trump, although David Crosby, Johnny Depp, Kamala Harris, Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell, Snoop Dogg, Kathy Griffin, and the Free Shakespeare in the Park troupe have by now exhausted the methods by which to rhetorically liquidate Trump (incineration, shooting by pistol, death by elevator, explosives, jumping off a cliff, shooting by automatic weapon, beheading, and stabbing by a mob).

...the sick Nazi comparison work both ways: It elevates political opponents into homicidal criminals who deserve extreme punishment, while reducing real historical monsters into little more than petty partisan zealots.

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